“Esso in the summertime was beautiful–cottages were repainted in primary colors, gardens grew dense with vegetables, the rivers ran high, and the mountains that surrounded the village turned dark with foliage. Her perspective as an outside observer being out on the land will feel especially familiar to those who moved to the rural North later in their lives: Book publicity has emphasized both its landscape description and the human interactions. Phillips spent time in Moscow in college, and later spent a year in Kamchatka on a Fulbright. 140) A visitor’s perspective to the landscape of Kamchatka

Nothing was left in the place it had occupied.” (p.

Revmira’s parents had raised her in a strong home, an idyllic village, a principled people, a living Even culture, a socialist nation of great achievement. The communities Revmira grew up in had splintered, making them easy places to be forgotten, easy places to disappear. Just look at the hole in her cousin’s life where a daughter belonged. Kamchatka was no longer a place to raise a family. And the disappearance of the girls impacts every woman in this story, weaving into their larger internal narrative, Relationships between people of multiple cultures, ages, and beliefs reveal intergenerational struggles between those who experienced the relative wealth of Soviet Kamchatka and the younger generation who have grown up with Internet and social media. In the rural north of Disappearing Earth, conflicting desires and impulses settle into maturity and acceptance of community expectations. Geography and history constrain patterns of behavior Loosely connected stories through the months of a year reveal the range of emotional impacts these disappearances have on women among the interlinked villages of this peninsula with no roads connected to the outside world.

Through this plot twist, Disappearing Earth presents the complex influence of cultural differences, colonialism, and the rural/urban divide on law enforcement and public response to the disappearances, all in the context of post-Soviet Russia. This horrific loss is later juxtaposed with the prior disappearance of an Indigenous Even teen from a remote village family.ĭisappearing girls and the complexity of responses The story opens with the kidnapping of two young Russian girls from the region’s largest city, who we understand are Caucasian. Set in the Kamchatka peninsula of far northeastern Russia, debut novelist Julia Phillips writes in Disappearing Earth about the interior worlds of women, the importance of community, and the impacts of gender-based violence on both, with a depth of human insight reminiscent of Tolstoy. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips has relevance for Alaska

Book review disappearing earth